A Cognitive Architecture for Naval Mine Countermeasures (MCM)

Current Mine Countermeasure (MCM) operations attempt to balance risk to commander"s intent and time via processes that are staff and time intensive. Existing tools such as MEDAL have helped to alleviate some of this, but those tools lack an comprehensive understanding of the uncertainties involved, and how those impact commander"s intent. Furthermore, existing tools are mostly passive, representing data, but not interpreting it, leaving issues of situation detection, assessment, and responding entirely up to the staff. An ideal tool would be a decision aid that works with users and existing tools to perform situation detection, assessment, and response. Such a tool would need to understand commander"s intent and the uncertainties inherent in MCM-relevant situations, apply expert MCM knowledge in understanding situations, relating intent and situations, and generating appropriate recommendations. Furthermore, such a tool needs to build trust with users by explaining how it arrived at those conclusions, including making the uncertainties involved clear. Recent years have seen increased development of cognitive architectures, which are ideal platforms for encoding expert knowledge and interacting with users. SoarTech proposes to leverage prior work in situation detection, assessment, response, and explanation. It will extend this work for the MCM domain, uncertainty, and user interaction.